What To Do If/When Delicious Dies (UPDATE: Maybe It Won’t)

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Yahoo! (remember the exclamation point, folks) is apparently shutting down a bunch of its “underperforming” websites, according to news that raced around the Internet today. The screenshot from a corporate webcast showed that among the likely casualties are AltaVista — okay, raise your hand if you even knew AltaVista still existed — and Buzz (not that Buzz, the OTHER Buzz), and “MyBlogLog” — anybody? — and something called AlltheWeb, and Delicious…

Wait, what?

Yes, the site that a lot of nerds use to share bookmarks, the one you might remember as del.icio.us, is, according to reports, about to die. That’s not good if you’ve been using the service, but there’s at least a simple way to save what you’ve stored there, and Lifehacker has helpfully provided instructions: Just go to Settings>Bookmarks>Export, export your bookmarks into an HTML file, import the file into your browser, and there you go. Tags and notes won’t import, but they’ll be in the actual HTML file if you need them.

Or, in the comments, someone suggests Diigo, a similar service that allows you to import Delicious bookmarks AND tags. So you have a few options, although no endorsements here — I jealously guard my bookmarks from all prying eyes, foreign and domestic.

Anyway, RIP Delicious, seven years and two months young. I never used you, but it was nice to know that I could have.

Comments

Hey! Just wanted to let you guys know that we just launched a del.icio.us alternative at http://www.hoarde.rs . You can easily import the bookmarks you’ve exported from deli.cio.us per the instructions in the above post.

We actually have a revenue model so no matter what happens to del.icio.us in the future we’ll still be around and are working hard to continue developing our site.

Yes, it appears that the whole thing is targeted for destruction, but there’s always the possibility that a) someone will buy the rights and technology, and b) parts of the doomed sites will live on incorporated into other Yahoo! properties; perhaps BabelFish will end up part of other Yahoo! search sites. One can hope….

(Man, I forgot about BabelFish. Used to use it all the time back in the day…)

*GASP* AltaVista?!? Does that mean the Babel Fish Translation site would get shut down, as well?!? THAT.MUST.NOT.HAPPEN! Not only because it’s a cool site that people (meaning, I) use all the time, but because it’s named after Douglas Adams’ babel fish from Hitchhikers!